Understanding and Mitigating the Negative Mental Health and Well-being Effects of Social Media

Over the past decade, rising social media usage has coincided with deteriorating mental health and wellbeing among young Americans. Social media poses a particularly acute threat to young Americans with low incomes due to their heavier usage of social media and their greater vulnerability to unfavorable social comparisons and manipulative advertising. Policymakers’ ability to intervene to mitigate the harms of social media is severely constrained by a lack of understanding of the mechanisms underlying those harms. This project proposes and empirically tests a new theory of the harms of social media, as well as corresponding interventions to mitigate those harms. The core idea is that social media platforms strategically promote content that provokes unfavorable social comparisons to increase users’ marginal utility of self-improvement and hence their willingness to pay for products advertised on the platform. We have already completed a large observational data collection confirming key predictions of the theory. We require funding for two data collections (N = 1,000) to test mechanisms that could inform the design of policy interventions, and to pilot the potential for interventions integrated into social media feeds to reduce engagement with, and negative welfare effects of, enviable social media content.